


The Gateway Arch

by Iapetus (wdyw)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, Blood, F/M, Gen, Percy does NOT have invincibility, Post-The Last Olympian, Will add more warnings/characters/triggers as they arise in the story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 15:18:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2626496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wdyw/pseuds/Iapetus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A boy, held captive, hoping no one will save him. A monster, sadistic and cruel, twisted by a lifetime of belittlement. A satyr, struggling to fulfill his duty and rescue his friend. A girl, desperate to save the one she loves before all hope is lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gateway Arch

**Author's Note:**

> This is a major reworking of a story (or trilogy, as it was at the time) that I wrote 25 chapters of on FFN before finally drifting away from writing and leaving it abandoned for years. Also, that was in seventh grade, so the whole story rather sucked anyway. I now plan to rewrite this story from the beginning as both a writing exercise for practice and as a way to get the story out of my head for good. Hopefully I'll be updating moderately quickly since I have 25 chapters sitting elsewhere as a guidebook, but I'm also really bad at punctuality, so... we'll see how this goes.

A lone woman stood atop a hill.  The sun glowed upon her back from its height in the brilliant blue of sky above; cast into shadow and silhouetted, she radiated a nearly angelic appearance.  A gentle breeze fluttered past, grazing her skin and gently caressing her black hair.  The woman had been until now remarkably unextraordinary, yet she would ensure that by day’s end she would be a most extraordinary person indeed.

Of course, she was also barely a person at all.  She had lived for millennia and intended to thrive for innumerable millennia to come.  Though many would describe her appearance as shockingly, even grotesquely, unintimidating, the select few able to see past the façade would detail a much more gruesome visage; the woman’s true skin was scaly and green, her tongue forked, her torso reptilian and snakelike.  Despite her veil of irrelevance, this woman was an anomaly, which soon many would never forget.

To most people, the woman was staring at a strawberry farm, but this too was an illusion.  The hill upon which she stood overlooked a camp filled with children, sparring and laughing and eating and singing.  The children were happy, investing in the foolish belief of security, playing their games and learning to defend themselves, and to the woman standing above them they all seemed so small.  So fantastically miniscule.  Ants in a glass box, working together and tunneling their way to deeper and greater truths but never managing to crack their way out.  The woman loathed these pests of the modern world, contenting herself with the knowledge that so little time would pass before they were extinguished.  She glared down upon them, and they never saw her coming.

In the distant and larger hill that towered far to the woman’s right side, a dragon circled a lone pine tree.  The dragon guarded the gilded fleece of an ancient ram, and this fleece, draped upon the branches of the tree, shielded the camp from unwanted intrusion.  The woman saw these protective measures and nearly laughed aloud, knowing that the true enemy of this camp was its own incompetence, and she intended to take this as her advantage.

Chuckling with ecstasy, she withdrew and palmed a small dagger from her robes.  This would be it.  Her chance for revenge, and her chance for recognition.  Her name would not be forgotten.  In one swift act, her rivals would learn a harsh lesson: children give only glimpses of the power of the mother.

Bending down to slice a wound in her leg before flinging the dagger down the hill behind her, the mother of all monsters screamed in agony and crumpled to the ground.

* * *

The sound awoke a girl who had been sleeping on the beach, though she barely registered it consciously and could not identify why she had seemed to spring out of slumber so urgently, as if to instantly punch someone’s nose in if needed.  Annabeth listened, but only the sound of the water drifted to her ears, so she assumed a bird had squawked above and laid her head back on the sand, letting her arm fall back to its original place around her boyfriend’s waist.  Her instincts were still intensely sharpened from the Second Olympian War; surprises stopped her heart and loud noises brought her hand to her dagger before she even registered what had happened.

She sighed into Percy’s neck.  It had been a long four years.  The concept of a simple date on the beach was the most extraordinary thing she had experienced since early childhood.  Percy had suggested it; the beach had always been a reminder of peaceful times.  The sleeping part had been more of an accident.  Still, even if things could get awkward or confusing, Annabeth liked this relationship thing; she just hoped she wouldn’t screw it up.

Suddenly noticing how high the sun had gotten, she kicked Percy, who groaned and rolled over.  “Come on, dork, it’s morning.  Rise and shine.”

She stood up and nudged him with her foot repeatedly, shaking him and getting sand on his shirt.  Finally he cracked a smile and got himself to his feet.

“Morning, sunshine,” he said smugly.  Annabeth laughed at his disheveled appearance, his hair sticking in every possible direction and caked with sand.  “I’m liking the sand aesthetic,” he added with a laugh, and she noticed that she too was covered with a layer of the clumpy mud.  Getting it all off would be a challenge.

Through a smile, she took his hand and dragged him away from the beach.  “Come on, Seaweed Brain, we both need showers before we can show our faces around here.”  Percy raised his eyebrows but laughed as they walked to her cabin, and he kissed her a quick goodbye before he set off to his own cabin.

Percy wasn’t used to feeling this great.  For once there was no dreadful prophecy looming in the distance and no impending doom to worry about.  He realized to his amusement that he was living a textbook happy ending.  He was living amongst his closest friends, his crush liked him back, and he had participated in the prevention of the apocalypse, not to mention legitimately being offered immortality and godship afterwards.  It’d be hard to beat that.  Had he peaked?  Would the rest of his life be a boringly uninterrupted pile of goo?  Percy promised to himself with a grin that he’d make sure to get into some minor danger every now and again, just to keep things interesting.

Still, he entered his cabin glad to finally be truly safe.

* * *

Swords clanged together and apart, slicing the air into shreds.  Travis lunged forward, bringing his blade inches from Malcolm’s chest, before Malcolm deflected and landed a kick to Travis’s knee, bringing him to the ground.  Malcolm attempted to disarm him, but Travis slid through the other’s legs and popped up behind him.  Malcolm turned to attack before a sound attacked them both; the shriek hung in the air and clung to their clothes long after it had finished its echo through the stadium.

The boys froze and looked at each other in horror.  Wordlessly, they dropped their swords and ran through the open doors.

Travis turned in circles, looking for who could have screamed.  He noticed other campers opening doors and poking heads out of cabins, sure they heard something but possibly unsure of what, but the source was nowhere to be seen.

“Over there!”

Malcolm was pointing to the top of Half-Blood Hill, where Travis could only just make out a fallen figure on the grass.  The two hurried to climb the hill.

“ _Help…._ ”  The stranger was uttering whispered cries and strangled calls for attention.  Travis and Malcolm exchanged a grave look of concern, then stepped outside the camp’s boundaries to address her.

The woman had long, black hair and wore a denim dress straight out of a 90’s Nickelodeon sitcom; she was also marvelously fat with a height to match of well over six feet.  She lay collapsed in the field, quietly wailing incoherently.  Malcolm kneeled trepidatiously by her side.  “Are you hurt?  Can we help you?”

The woman struggled to move.  Malcolm gestured for Travis to grab her right arm; Malcolm took her left, and they struggled to lift her at all off the ground.  “ _My leg…_ ” she whispered.

Malcolm dropped her arm and hurried to her side, where he helped pull her legs out from underneath her.  He found a large gash on her left leg oozing blood and inhaled sharply.  It looked painful.

“What happened to you?” he asked in horror.

“I… I don’t know… something came out of nowhere and I… I just wanted to look at the strawberries….”  She let out a sob and lay her head back on the grass.

Malcolm took a deep breath.  “Travis, we have to let her into the camp.”

Travis looked up incredulously.  “Are you joking?  We have no idea who this lady is!  Even I know that’s a bad idea.”

“I know that, but do you see another option?  Because I don’t think there’s a doctor, or much of anything, for miles.  We’ll take her to Chiron and get her attention from inside.”

Travis sighed.  “Ugh, fine.  But if she turns out to be some crazy evil murderess lady, I was never here.”

He stepped behind the boundary and muttered, “I, Travis Stoll, give you permission to enter camp.”

Then the two of them, after a great struggle, got the woman to her feet and helped her inside.

* * *

Night was falling, and dinnertime was approaching.  Percy sat on his bed, having just cleaned up some of the mess he typically made in his cabin.  Proud of his work, he was about to head to the Dining Pavilion when –

Percy spun on his heel.  The sound had drifted in through his open window.  As he stood in audience, the crackling sound grew louder, almost closer.  Either someone was stomping around on the leaves out there or they were violently eating Chex Mix with their mouth open.

This probably was not a good sign.  He turned and walked around his bed to grab Riptide from his nightstand.  Uncapping it, he walked back to the window, but the sound had stopped.

“Hello?” he called.

There was no way it could be a monster, right?  The Fleece was there for exactly this reason.

Hearing nothing further, he closed his window and chuckled at his postwar paranoia.

And then there was a thump from behind him.

_Thump. Thump._

_Thump._


End file.
